David Selzer

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POETRY

THE DEARTH OF HONEY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

Where the mortar between old bricks has crumbled

in the weathers, where the felt of a flat roof

has lifted, beneath slates above a gutter

through a gap the height of a feather,

among cascades of ivy on a high wall

topped with broken glass, wild bees are about

their business, crowding buddleia, bending

stalks of lavender, devoted subjects

of their queen, diminutive beside

dying cousins. On their fragile wings

we, republican or monarchist, depend,

each flight an errand of life, the music

of warmth, the gentle drone of summer, once

gone never returning.

 

 

 

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POETRY

TEATRO DEI RIUNITI

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

The Tiber’s olive waters curve past

Umbertide or, rather, the town curves

to the river in this limpid valley

alive with oak trees, willows, poplars

and millennia of settlements,

monuments – Etruscan, Roman, Lombard.

 

To impede the German’s retreat northwards,

the Allies bombed the bridge across the river

successfully and, collaterally,

razed a block of tall, narrow houses –

and many of their inhabitants.

 

The house numbers are brass inlaid in the setts

of what is now a car park in this

medieval town with its Via Papa

Giovanni XXIII, its Via

Kennedy, its Piazza Carlo Marx.

 

The Eighth Army built a bailey bridge

on the ancient arches – which was still there

when we performed Shakespeare, in English,

at the theatre. Unused and derelict

because of the war, the baroque theatre

was renovated by an alliance

of Communists and Christian Democrats,

I Riuniti. It had been a gift

from the town’s most famous son, Domenico

Bruni, a castrato, emasculated

for the usual reasons – poverty, greed.

A celebrity acclaimed and enriched,

he sang in Rome, Naples, Milan, London

and St Petersburg for Catherine the Great.

 

He might have stood by the deep canal

that channels the winter torrents through the town

from the mountains into the Tiber.

Our play was The Comedy of Errors,

in which one of the lads from Syracuse says,

‘He that commends me to mine own content

Commends me to the thing I cannot get.’

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE TARRY WHALE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

There were two wonders in our provincial town

on the cindery car park by the river

when I was seventeen – both August marvels.

 

First was the Century Theatre,

with its proper post war worthiness,

touring each year the north and the midlands

from the Five Towns to West Hartlepool

in three bespoke aluminium trailers

pulled by an ex-army Crossley tractor.

The same actress played Jimmy Porter’s

Alison, Sally Bowles and Elena

Ivanova Popova in ‘The Bear’.

I was struck – by the stage, the moon and love.

 

Next, on a seventy foot flat-bed truck,

was a dead fin-back whale harpooned

off Trondheim, preserved in formaldehyde

and painted with tar. It toured through the north

surreally as ‘Jonah the Whale’ as if

the rabbit foot had become the rabbit.

It lay like an elongated accident.

For a shilling you could get up close

and see the dead eye and the once olive

striated skin blackened with tar – and smell,

despite the preservatives, the corruption.

 

Better was the view from the city walls.

Where there had been outrageous laughter was beached

that solitary, dark leviathan.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE ANATOMY OF PILGRIMAGE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.7K views

We had not visited Beddgelert for years.

We remembered the winding, bosky drive

following the Glaslyn from Porthmadog,

slowly climbing as the swift river narrows;

the walk across the field to Gelert’s grave

with its slate marker his remorseful owner,

Prince Llywelyn the Great, erected

for the faithful hound he had killed in

frantic error, finding too late the dead wolf

and the saved baby. Who would not be moved

by such an irredeemable act!

The sounds of endless waters rush nearby.

 

What was new that hot August Bank Holiday

was a tumbled faux bothy at the edge

of the field with an under-sized bronze dog

eager in the doorway; the eerie whistle

of the tourist train on the re-opened

railway that carried the quarried slate

down to Porthmadog, across to Caernafon

through mountain passes of green and purple;

a coach from an EFL summer school

full of excited Chinese students;

an Orthodox Jewish family, mother

with headscarf, father with keppel and earlocks,

little girls in long skirts; two young women,

in hijabs, sitting on the river’s bank,

bathing their feet in the chilly shallows.

 

Dafyd Prytchard, the  landlord of Beddgelert’s

Royal Goat Hotel, invented the story

in the late eighteenth century. Gelert

was the saint for whom the village was named.

Wales was brimful with saints, their remains

unvisited post-reformation,

but who would pass by a doughty dog’s!

 

 

 

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POETRY

ANOTHER PLACE REVISITED AT LOW WATER

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.7K views


‘It is no hero, no ideal, just the industrially reproduced body of a middle-aged man trying to remain standing and trying to breathe.’ Anthony Gormley

 

They are still standing and their slow carapace

of barnacles breathes. Small pools of eaten

razor clams and star fish lie at their feet – fry

dart amongst seaweed fronds and the dead.

An off shore breeze brings the calls of distant

sea birds close. The RNLI flag stiffens

and plastic kites, on the slight headland, swoop –

but the cumulus clouds and the con trails,

across the Atlantic, are almost still.

Wind turbines proliferate on Burbo Bank

and, beyond, along the North Wales coast.

Over the horizon, the world awaits

high tide. Meanwhile, on tricky sands, we move

with care among these icons of cast-iron

steadfastness and promise.

 

 

 

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POETRY

A TERRIBLE SILENCE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read1.7K views

‘The sounds of people drowning are something that I cannot describe to you, and neither can anyone else. It’s the most dreadful sound and there is a terrible silence that follows it.’

A GIRL ABOARD THE TITANIC: A SURVIVOR’S STORY, Eva Hart

 

We found ourselves spending time in Godalming

on one of those sun baked, humid July days

that surprise England. The air was thick

with flying ants. We sought shade under willows

on the banks of the Wey, that meanders

through meadowland. Brindle cattle grazed

and flicked their tails. Gnats and midges sought us –

so we walked on beside the river. Boys

from Charterhouse canoed past us hooray

henrying as we entered the cloister

on the Jack Phillips Memorial Ground.

 

Phillips, senior wireless telegraphist

on the Titanic, was a local chap,

son of the manager of a draper’s.

Built – perhaps as much for sense-making as

grieving – the year after the disaster

and some years before the slaughtering began,

the cloister is in Surrey brick and tile,

with a lily pond and dragon flies

darting, hovering. We sat in the arcade’s

shadows, silent then sharing our thoughts.

 

His commissions or omissions were

or were not instrumental in the sinking –

the message about icebergs and field ice

directly ahead from another ship

was recorded, put to one side, forgotten

as he cleared a backlog of telegrams

from first class passengers. How do they compare

with watertight compartments that were

anything but, a lack of lifeboats,

no drill of any sort, vain glory?

‘He died at his post,’ the inscription reads.

 

On our way back to the High Street we passed

the Parish Church with its memorial

in bronze to Jack – and one to the small town’s

two hundred and eighty one Great War dead.

The church doors were open and the day’s heat

brought out the smell of musty hymnals

and dusty hassocks – a silenced heat,

one burdened with class and protocol,

suppressing anger, guilt.

 

 

 

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